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Carnival time, again

Berry Go Round No. 5 is up at A Neotropical Savanna. There’s a lot celebrating the birthday of Linnaeus on 23 May in the Gregorian calendar. ((If we’d known that last week, we might have made more of it.)) But there are also some dandy posts on food and agriculture, to whit: My Asparagus Adventure, Best Fruit Ever? (the pomegranate), and Drought for Thought.

Berry Go Round is fast becoming a don’t miss carnival; Mary Farmer (no jokes, please) did a great job putting this month’s edition together.

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Put another shrimp on the barbie

Old cookbooks are a great way of documenting changes in taste, eating habits and diets, but I wonder if they’ve ever been used in a systematic way to track changes in biodiversity in a country’s landscape, or agricultural biodiversity — either at species or genetic level — on its farms. Such thoughts are prompted by news of an exhibition of historic Australian cookbooks, with their recipes for things like parrots and kangaroo brains. Beer is a crucial complement to much Aussie grub, of course, and I hope the hop procurement problems being encountered by the brewing industry in the US are not being experienced Down Under.

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Farming and tourism

You may remember my recent post from Lima bemoaning the lost opportunity of linking agrobiodiversity education with tours of an archaeological site. Here’s an example of such an opportunity emphatically grasped. An historic farmhouse in Rhode Island is offering “visitors, particularly children, a glimpse into the lost world of small-scale farming in New England, when the distance between the chicken coop and the dinner plate was much shorter.” And that includes heirloom varieties, for example of tomatoes, of which the staff grow 30. They also keep some local ((Later: Ok, Jeremy, how about “locally important”?)) livestock breeds, including Red Devon cattle, famous for pulling settlers’ wagon trains West.

“One of the things we’ve worked on since we’ve been here is constantly trying to cultivate in people’s minds and hearts a preservation ethic, not just about preserving an old house,” he said, “but preserving landscapes.”

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Breeding clubs

As in many other (most?) walks of life, there is much that professional breeders can learn from “amateurs” (i.e., farmers), and vice versa. The experience of the taro breeders’ club in Samoa is a good example of that. Danny has already blogged for us about this. There are also examples of livestock (and pet) breeders’ clubs, and plenty of them according to Google. Many more than for crops, it looks to me. I don’t know much about such livestock clubs, and would welcome more information on how successful they have been, and whether we who are more into crops can learn anything from their experience. Anyway, there’s a great discussion of the advantages of the club approach to breeding crops for pest resistance in a downloadable recent 1995 IDRC publication. It’s accompanied by a list of crops best avoided by clubs, though the Evil Fruit Lord begs to differ.

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Nibbles: Sprouts, Mice, Prices, Prices, Prices, Prices, Gooseberry, Fruits, Fruits, Subsidies, Climate change, Fruits again, Culture, Irrigation